Friday, March 23 at SPNEA, One Bowdoin Square, Boston
Saturday, March 24 at Boston University, The Castle, 225 Bay State Road, Boston

Friday at SPNEA:

3:00 pm Registration

3:15 pm Opening Remarks from Jane C. Nylander, SPNEA President

3:30 pm - Session: Controlling Factors: Municipal Power in Urban Architecture

Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row: The Rise and The Decline of Municipal Control
Thomas G. Beischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

An Architecture of Commerce: The Merchant’s Exchange Project by Thomas Alexander Teft
John Harwood, Columbia University

The Meadows Neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia
Anne Krulikowski, University of Delaware

Respondent: Naomi Miller, Professor, Department of Art History, Boston University

5:30 pm Reception & guided tours at the Harrison Gray Otis House

Saturday at Boston University:

8:45 am Registration and Refreshments

9:00 am Welcome by Bruce Schulman, Director, American and New England Studies Program, Boston University

9:15 am - Session: Problematizing Urban Women: Gender and Social Reform in the City

“The Means of Doing Some Good”: The Methodist Female Relief Society of Boston, 1828-1868
Jonathan Cooney, Boston University

The New England Female Medical College and the “Traps and Snares” of Boston’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban Environment
Martha Gardner, Brandeis University

Women’s Rights and Women’s Needs: Creating an Evangelical Christian Platform for Urban Change through the Y.W.C.A. of Worcester, Mass., 1885-1920
Lisa Connelly Cook, Clark University

Respondent: Susan Porter, SPNEA Manager of Research

11:15 am Keynote Address
The Moral Geography of the Working Girl and the New Woman, Boston 1890-1920
Sarah Deutsch, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Arizona

1:30 pm - Session: Maids, Mistresses, and Material Culture: Class Relations in the Elite Home

They Are the Rooms They Live In: Homes and Upper Class Identity in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
Elif Sinanoglu, Boston University

The Community of Women Inside 240 Summit Avenue, 1900-1920
Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Boston University

Respondent: Marcia Folsom, Professor of Humanities, Wheelock College

3:15 pm - Session: Class-Bridging: Civic and Cultural Institutions

Exploring the Middlebrow: Music and Class Anxieties in Boston, 1850-1900
Christina Kopp, Boston University

“A Cage Ready for Our Birds When We Catch Them”: The Architecture of Cultural Idealism at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia
Brian C. Clancy, Rutgers University

Uplifting the Public through Public Libraries: A Study of the New Bedford Free Public Library
Paula M. Kaczor, Simmons College

Respondent: Nina Silber, Associate Professor, Department of History, Boston University

5 pm Reception hosted by Boston University

For more information, call or e-mail the number and address below.